Amateur Hour Over At Twitter? — It doesn't really matter if Twitter's Chief Architect Blaine Cook was fired or resigned. The important thing is that he's gone now, and this gives Twitter the opportunity to hire someone (or a team) who may actually be able to scale the nearly two year old service and keep it live.

Lead Architect Blaine Cook Out At Twitter — Blaine Cook, lead architect at red-hot, sometimes-down Twitter, has left the company. In an email to SAI, Blaine describes his departure at an “amicable” one. — I left Twitter just over two weeks ago. It's an amicable change …

Twitter-storm: Blaine leaves, blame flies — If you need any proof that Twitter is the hot topic in the blogosphere at the moment, all you have to do is look at the volume of blog posts about the service — and related services such as Tweetscan and Twist (Twitter trends) — on sites like TechCrunch.

Amazon earnings solid; Ups sales range — Amazon on Wednesday reported first quarter earnings of $143 million, or 34 cents a share, on revenue of $4.13 billion, up 37 percent from the year ago quarter. The company also increased its sales range for the second quarter and 2008.

Apple Buys Chip Designer — Apple has agreed to spend $278 million in cash to buy a boutique microprocessor design company that could create a chip for its flagship iPhone, and possibly iPod products as well. — The 150-person chip company, P.A. Semi, was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl …

Comcast Is Serious About Wireless — Hot on the heels of a report that Comcast will no longer offer Sprint's wireless service through Pivot, GigaOM has learned that the cable company is creating its own wireless division and has hired the former CTO of Telefonica O2 Europe, Dave Williams, as the unit's CTO.

FBI, politicos renew push for ISP data retention laws — FBI director Robert Mueller calls for new federal data retention laws forcing Internet companies to keep records of what their customers are doing, but without providing details. Several politicians endorsed the idea during a hearing on Tuesday.

Google domain names - the funny, strange and surprising — Google owns a whole bunch of domain names other than the obvious ones like google.com, blogger.com and gmail.com. We here at Pingdom decided to find out which ones, with some truly surprising results. — We only looked at .com domain names, and found thousands.

Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs — Lately I've been delving into the WordPress ecosystem, as it seems to be the most popular blogging platform around at the moment. I've set up two blogs with it so far. In the process, I've gotten quite comfortable with the setup, interface, and overall operation of WordPress.

Comcast: AT&T's U-Verse is messing with our network — Back in the pre-fiber days, cable and phone companies competed for broadband and voice customers. With Verizon and AT&T rolling out fiber networks, competition has come to the television set—and the fight sometimes gets ugly.

Get Blown On Facebook — What is it with college kids and online video challenges? There are plenty of startups catering to this strange video niche/fetish. IBeatYou and Strutta (read our review) have dedicated their entire Websites to this activity. And now Blowtorch Entertainment …